Abby Manock is a multi genre artist and visual designer working in sculpture, drawing, video, interactive performance events, art sports, prop and set design/fabrication, costuming, scenic painting, textile design, and illustration. Both her studio practice and visual design work are rooted in a love for physical and conceptual involvement with materials and all aspects of the process of making. Her artworks have been included in select exhibitions and festivals in New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and MARTE Contemporáneo in San Salvador, El Salvador. Her large scale, interactive and game-like performative projects have been showcased by Coachella Music and Arts Festival in California, the Deitch Projects Art Parade in NYC, Performagia in Mexico City, w00t Experimental Games Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark, the William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT. Her corporate clients include: Toys R Us, Cabot Creamery, Seventh Generation, Ben and Jerry's, as well as many projects for small business, restaurant, non-profit and political candidates. She has lectured at the Art Center of South Florida, Bowdoin College, and the University of Connecticut. Abby Manock received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007 where she is currently an adjunct drawing professor. Abby lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

ARTIST STATEMENT for studio practice

Abby is constantly and frenetically building a universe all her own using a language of the familiar. Her artwork is an entourage of recurring characters, themes, tools, colors, and motifs, expanding generationally through trajectories, tangents, episodes and games, with each incarnation echoing back and building upon previous projects. Abby creates platforms for these mash-ups by observing, appropriating and re-contextualizing systems of control and embedded routine within insular, idiosyncratic realms of rock concerts, school, performance art, nursery rhyme, holiday ritual, trade show, corporate office, military ranking, parade, experimental theatre, sports culture, reality television, psychological study, to name a few. By abstracting pieces of infrastructure from each of these separate institutional entities, she re-claims them with her set of signature visual stamps, and presents them, re-purposed as the building blocks of her own exploded narrative. This outward-inward exploration and re-construction encourages a conversation between the individual’s transcendence of the subconscious and place within the greater social sphere. All aspects of Abby’s work, from seeds as drawings, through the processes of proposal, making, transporting, staging, performing, and striking and storage are integral components of her visual lineage.